That's Me in the Corner

Don't be such a snot bubble.

Dad, there's no such thing.

Of course there is. In fact, I majored in snot bubbles in college.

No . . . You didn't.

And he was right of course. I never majored in snot bubbles. What little college I did finish was devoted solely to the theater. Instead of Speech, I took Voice. Instead of PE, I took fencing and dance. Psychology was devoted to the scansion of plays, history was Henry V, mathematics was lighting design and four part harmony. Women studies remained the same, but Ophelia was my model and Katherine my muse. I walked away with a certificate of completion, a strong diaphragm, and an identity crisis.

Ten years later, having a pint with an old friend (Well, porter for me, a big tasty glass of water for Jon), I was asked if I ever had any desire to return to the stage.

Sometimes, maybe, not really.

Not sure if I would let a juicy part slip through my fingers, though. Maybe Hamlet or Iago. The Emcee in Cabaret, or Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. I would jump at the chance to see my own failed musical staged, and I would be hard pressed to say no to an invitation to participate in just about anything involving those long lost friends whose blood sweat and tears have mingled with my own. But the pursuit of stage is a singularly devoted one, and my life is too precariously balanced to invite that level of obsession.

After we finished our meal (pizza for me, salmon salad for Jon) we drove eleven blocks to a see a preview of a new play opening that weekend. The space was special to Jon in that he is a resident artist of the theatre group, and his fiance designed the set.

The set was pretty stunning. A center stair case spiraling into a stratospheric oak tree. Intricate levels of staging areas, lots of eye candy, compact enough to be intimate, grand enough to create distance. It's a shame that the play wasn't rewritten to make better use of it.

The play, a two actor mishmash of themes. Love, sex, poetry. Life, death, birth, sickness, rebirth, crazy talk, brief violence and mild nudity. Or is it mild violence and brief nudity? Poetry as dialogue, stage direction as dialogue, list upon list upon list as dialogue.

The story, a tale of boy meets girl, girl gets stabbed by an environmentalist, girl gets sick, girl turns into tree.

And herein lays the problem.

We have all read "The Giving Tree."

It is rooted in our soul.

Chuckle, chuckle.

However, as any agronomist will tell you, a tree isn't exactly the nurturing mother earth life giving creature its made out to be in transcendental poetry.

A tree,

is in fact,

a weed.

That's right. A big weed.

A water hoarding, nutrient zapping, soul sucking weed.

And had the writer taken a botany class, and possibly been blessed with a sense of humor, this play would have had a good guy, a bad guy, and a truly original metaphor that might have propelled it into one of those great nights of theatre.

Alas.

But I'm not a theatre critic. Nor should this influence anyone. And I haven't really gotten to the meat of this weeks tale.

In order to stay on track, we have to introduce a new character.

The female lead of the play.

And there is something not quite right about her.

She is pretty. But not second look pretty.

She is thin. But not athletic, or grotesque thin. The kind of thin a girl in her thirties gets when she works all day and all night, and doesn't see the sun light and doesn't eat enough food.

She smiles a hard smile, she moves with the elegance of a former dancer, and her eyes betray a frightful lack of confidence that I've seen so many times before in the nightmarish hallways of audition purgatory. There is no Bachelors from Brown or MFA from A.C.T., that could ever erase the wall she has built to keep the cruel real world at arms length.

It was her first line that gave her away.

After a painful emotional roller coaster monologue from the male actor, she has this one line:

"Shut up."

That's it.

"Shut up."

There are a million ways a wife can tell a husband to shut up, and even after a decade with my wife I am still learning new ones. There are tones and nuances of voice that speak volumes. Anywhere from "Shut up and kiss me." to "If you don't shut the fuck up right now I am going to stick this fork in your eye."

But the "Shut up" delivered by the female lead actor, wasn't any of those. And every subsequent line of dialogue and awkward physical seduction proved that this poor lady has never made the real human connection needed to deliver the line with the gravitas required.

For the actor's life is no life at all.

A fairy tale cocoon of comedy and tragedy.

Men have it much easier. For our identity is facade.

Woman is labyrinth.

Only for our female lead and the others who have trudged this trail of hopelessness, the labyrinth goes nowhere, for it has never been anywhere.

In a few years she'll start teaching. She'll attach herself to a community theater. She play as many of the roles as she can as she ages from Dorothy to the Wicked Witch.

She may have children, but most likely cats. She'll travel the world. She'll have friends. She'll know what good wine tastes like, but she'll always come home to the half filled bottle of the cheap stuff.

She'll never regret her decision to devote her life to the stage. But she'll never know how to tell a man to shut up the way my wife can. And her performances will forever lack the depth of the true human experience.

I chose differently.

Mostly cause I was hungry.

Which leads me to the climax of my story.

In a few short months, Taylor will begin making those kind of choices. Each path along the way is filled with broken hearts, broken dreams, devotion, obsession, tragedy, comedy, and a whole lotta farce. I don't understand him the way I do most people. I don't know how to empathize with him the way I can with someone I just met. Think of how eerie it is to be the central male figure in a boy's life for over a decade, and not have the faintest idea about what makes him tick.

So I don't know which kinds of choices he'll make or how to guide him through that process.

I tease him. But I have to stop because his facade is wearing thin.

Who knows which melting pot he'll find himself in.

Right now, he wants to be a Forensic Scientist. Which means his classes will take him through a myriad of chemistry, physics, biology. I can offer no support other than to eat well and get some rest. Go for a walk. Turn the headphones down a little bit.

Calvin is easy. He wants to be a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

If a certificate of completion from a now defunct acting program taught me anything at all, it was how to grow up to become a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

But Taylor is going to be needing a graphing calculator. He's going to be reading books that have words I don't even know and couldn't put into a sentence. His whole world is flying beyond my intellectual grasp.

If I was the father of our female lead when she was eighteen, I would at least have some sense as to where her life was taking her, we could at least have casual conversations, I could be a help, I could be a support, I could offer my advice when needed, and keep my mouth shut when not, and I might even know the difference. But then again, maybe not.

He will be dissecting things.

Somewhere along the line, he could be extrapolating cause of death scenarios from the mucus membranes recently deceased cadavers. And he might be excellent at it.

He could enter a world where people are the masters of mucus membranes and what effect they have in life or death situations, where I would just have to stand quietly in a corner with my thumb up my ass, waiting for lunch time to come around.

Cause I'm hungry.

He could be so proficient in extrapolating cause of death scenarios from the mucus membranes recently deceased cadavers that he may . . .

in fact . . .

Major in Snot Bubbles.

And I couldn't be any prouder than if he actually grew to be a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.